Trending News: This Is The Advice Bill Gates Would Give His Younger Self

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If you had one question for Bill and Melinda Gates, what would it be? Because it probably wouldn’t be as good as Mark Zuckerberg’s.

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With an estimated net worth of $71 billion and an ultra-successful internet company, you’d think Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t need to take advice from anyone.

Then again, the enormous degree of controversy that has dogged Facebook since the start of the year, centred on the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, has led many to question the fundamental ethics of his business practices.

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s happened before.

In the late 1990s, the United States’ last great tech mogul, Bill Gates, found himself in a very similar position. Microsoft, then the dominant player in Silicon Valley and worth billions of dollars, was dragged through the US courts over an antitrust suit (following the demise of Netscape).

The suit has often been pegged as the start of Microsoft’s years of decline. So it was slightly uncanny when Mark Zuckerberg logged into a Facebook Live Q&A event at New York’s Hunter College with Bill and Melinda Gates and asked the couple the classic question: “If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?”

Bill Gates gave a cracking response, saying he wished he’d understood the value of different kinds of intelligence.

“I was so naive about different skill sets,” he said. “I thought if somebody had a high IQ, they could be good at everything. And the idea that you needed to blend these different types of skills together, that always continued to surprise me.”

“There was this simple idea of smartness and it could go and solve everything — I wish I had known better than to think that.”

The answer feels like a stinging rebuke delivered to Gates’ younger self. While today widely admired for his philanthropy, at the height of the antitrust case he became known for an infamous deposition where he obfuscated relentlessly.

“He looked bad, there’s no question. He didn’t look truthful. He looked calculating, and I think that probably both damaged Microsoft’s public image,” Doug Melamed told The Ringer recently in an eye-opening oral history of the case. Melamed was at the time acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.

Zuckerberg has since apologized for Facebook’s mistakes over the Cambridge Analytica affair, and has appeared contrite in public — a far cry from Gates’ antagonism of a couple of decades ago.

Not to be outdone, Melinda Gates also had some pearls of wisdom at the mid-February event, saying, “Trust yourself. You probably know more than you think you do.” She also said it was never too late to stop learning.”